Economics of Compassion
This course relates various fields in economics (such as education, environmental, health care, labor, development, etc.) to questions regarding morality, charity, fairness and collective action. The syllabus for the Spring 2010 course is below. Also, the papers and articles used in teaching the class are posted.
Sowell, Thomas. "The Power of Fallacies" in Economic Facts and Fallacies
Solomon, Robert C. and Mark C. Murphy. "Introduction" in What is Justice?
Zajac, Ed. "Positive Theories 1: The Formal Principle of Distributive Justice and Institutional Framing" in Political Economy of Fairness
Cornuelle, Richard. Reclaiming the American Dream . Selected Readings.
Rector, Robert. "How Poor Are America’s Poor?: Examining the "Plague" of Poverty in America"
Gruber, Jonathan. "Covering the Uninsured in the United States" Journal of Economic Literature 46: 571-606 (2008)
Thorne, E.D. "The Economics of Organ Transplantation" Handbook of the Economics of Altruism, Giving, and Reciprocity
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo. "The Economic Lives of the Poor" Journal of Economic Perspectives 21: 141-167 (2007)
Collier, Paul. "On Missing the Boat: The Marginalization of the Bottom Billion in the World’s Economy" in The Bottom Billion
Sen, Amartya. "How to Judge Globalism"
Fisman, Raymond and Edward Miguel. "Introduction" and "Chicken or the Egg?" in Economic Gangsters
There is also a fantastic story that Shane Claiborne tells in his book (titled Irresistible Revolution ) about a lecture that he gave at Princeton University where a student asked him about the one issue of oppression or injustice that we should be concerned about most in the world today. Shane goes on to remind them and us that these are not merely issues but people. In the same way I also showed documentaries in class in order to show in a different way the lives we’re trying to help, not aggregate statistics. These are links to the documentaries we showed in class.
